I did my first fitness test of the season yesterday. It was OK for this early on. I managed 6.5 on the Leger Beep Test. I need to hit 7 on this so I'm just 30 seconds of maintaining level 6 pace away from that. My 40m sprint time was 6.7s which is better than I managed last year and just adequate for my grade. Realistically I know I can bump ( Read more... )

Fitness test duly completed; 2400m in 11m31s which is quite good and 40m in 7.4s which isn't.

Just back from a longish bike ride. It was a bit of an experiment as I didn't want to go out and back the same way and I wanted a route with more hills than, say, going out to Port Credit. I went north up Sherbourne and continued generallynorth through Rosedale, over the Summerhill pedestrian bridge to Moore Avenue and the south side of Mount ( Read more... )

The weekend before last I went to nomads indoor training and rather overdid with the result that i was pretty much crippled for two days afterwards. This Sunday I paced myself better. Even during the warm up I was feeling tight through the groin area and so stopped and took some time out to thoroughly stretch the tight area. I probably did about ( Read more... )

Today was the first day of Nomads' pre season training under the dome at UCC. The turnout was mixed. The U18s (including many of my squad from last year) and the U16s were out in force. The girls were there in numbers too but where were the senior men? There may have been more junior coaches than senior players there. I joined in most of the ( Read more... )

Yesterday my physio cleared me to start exercising again. I was to start with ten minutes of something running related, like running on a treadmill or stairclimbing but stop if the pain reached 3/10. If OK then I was to increase the amount by a couple of minutes each day. I've just done ten minutes of stair climbing. I'd put the pain at 1.5-2/ ( Read more... )

I'm starting to think about next rugby season. I am going to be refereeing. That means job one is to be match fit by the start of May. I'm thinking that if I keep running four to five times/week, do a bit of skiing and maybe do some 'staircase' workouts, maybe twice per week, I should be in good shape to start getting in shape around the middle ( Read more... )

I've been having a hard time with the running for the past couple of weeks. It's mostly been mental but a slight hamstring strain hasn't helped. Today was good though. 3.2km in 15m58s so not great but at least it felt like running again.

3.2km in 15m05s this morning (4m43s/km). That's a pretty big improvement. The not so great news is that I appear to have the Yeomen 2nds again on Saturday. It's a measure of how far my mood has improved since Sunday that I feel relatively unbothered by it.

3.2km in 16m10s this morning. That's 5m3s/km which is pretty much what I was hoping for and 1m20s faster than six weeks ago.